Résumé : Le fonctionnalisme est une solution populaire au problème esprit– corps. Il a un certain nombre de versions. Nous en exposons certaines parmi les principales, en énumérant une partie de leurs caractéristiques les plus importantes ainsi que certains « bugs » qui les ont entachées. Nous présentons comment les différentes variantes sont liées. Nombreux ont été les pessimistes à propos des...

In Natural Minds, Thomas Polger joins a growing number of theorists who defend the mind-brain type-identity theory while casting doubt upon orthodox nonreductive varieties of functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Polger has written a fine book in a fast-paced style that covers a lot of ground. He discusses different kinds of multiple realizability and their support for functionalism (ch. 1),...

Quote: Originally Posted by TecnoTut Functionalism, whether it be machine functionalism, teleofunctionalism, or just plain old fashioned functionalism, merely describes what mental properties do, not what mental properties are ... Although functionalists associate themselves with materialistic monism (that is, the view that only material things exist), there is a dualism lurking beneath the sur...

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and ...

I introduce “nomic-role nonreductionism” as an alternative to causal-role functionalism in the philosophy of mind. It is inspired by recent trends in cognitive science that emphasize embodied cognition and multi-level methods of explanation in the special sciences. While causal-role functionalists identify mental properties by an intra-level transition theory that describes relations between in...

What exactly is the relationship between physical and mental properties?∗ On this question materialist philosophers and cognitive scientists have a very limited range of basic alternatives (short of rejecting mental properties as real properties; cf. Churchland 1981). Broadly speaking, these alternatives are: some form of behaviorism, some form of the identity theory,1 and some form of function...